Jun 14 2009
Sunday Morning Verse – 6/14/09
Using the site, Sanders Web, I will generate a random Bible verse and analyze it here. We’ll see how this goes.
1 Corinthians 13:13
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Hmm… I used to have such an affinity to this verse and those around it. Although, I did always wonder… if love was the greatest one, does a person really need to have strong faith or hope to get to heaven? I didn’t ponder too long on this back in the day, because it would give me a headache. But once I started truly questioning, I pondered this more.
We’re told that we are to have great faith. That without faith, we have nothing. That faith is the cornerstone to being a believing Christian. That at some point, to believe all of the crazy stories in the Bible, we must have this thing called faith. So… when I read a verse like this, I can’t help but ask. Is faith really that important? Or is love the thing, that in the end, matters most.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
One response so far
There is much confusion between faith and belief. In my view, belief is a mere mental operation that disappears when one attains knowledge. To believe in the literal truth of a scripture is suppression of reason in order to attain obedience to authority. It is not faith.
Faith is the knowledge that reality is eternal, and that we are not separate from that. There are millions of metaphors that point to this, but this is really it.
Love is the energy by which faith manifests in life. It requires conscious commitment and action towards the good.
Hope is really just an effect of faith, and in my opinion doesn’t belong in a triad with the other two.
Paul, like so many religious thinkers, deluded himself with an historical god that planned a destiny for historical men. I reject any such plan or destiny. They are abstractions based on human desire, and only lead to suffering.
In some passages Paul rises above his historical consciousness and allows a kind of inspired poetry to speak through him. This is one of those passages, I think.